“You feel shitty emotionally, there’s just a lot of shame involved, like, it’s really terrible.

“You feel shitty emotionally, there’s just a lot of shame involved, like, it’s really terrible. But what nobody tells you about herpes is that it’s not really that bad.”

by Alexandra Molotkow

Conversations About Herpes:
Part I of an ongoing series in which we talk about STIs.

1.

Can you tell me about when you found out you’d gotten herpes?
I got herpes a long time ago. And I know who I got it from — you know, kind of a regular — it was on and off, so I can’t remember what phase we were in, and he had cold sores. And he went down on me. And I got it. I remember being in a washroom after I found out and feeling really upset about it, and feeling like maybe my sexual life was over, basically.

How old were you?
In my early 30s. And then I remember having a conversation with him on the phone where I told him. And he’s a germaphobe — I didn’t know at that time it was the oral herpes strain, and I can’t even remember if I was sleeping with anybody else. I may have been. But he was kind of accusing me of having brought it into his life, which obviously made me feel like shit.

Yeah. What did you say to that?
Oh, I can’t remember. I remember feeling very relieved, too, that it was the oral strain, and still, if it comes up, it seems less shameful. I remember doing research about it — because I had the one flare-up, and then never had another flare-up, and I remember reading that that was more common with the oral strain. In my mind, it’s like I had herpes, but it’s the kind you can only have once and not this lingering, festering thing in you.

Less shameful because of the practical or emotional implications?
I think it’s both. Cold sores are not stigmatized. People don’t call that herpes. They say, “I’ve got cold sores.” It’s not like people like them, but it’s not sexual. So I think it was partly that. And I also remember — I think maybe once with somebody I didn’t disclose, and disclosing with [my current partner] weighed on me quite heavily. But I did, and he was fine with it.

Had you been together beforehand?
Well, we were friends, and we had a fairly long period of fooling around with no intercourse, ostensibly a “let’s just take this slow” kind of thing. Maybe in the back of my mind there was concern about herpes. But at some point before we had sex I told him.

And he took it well.
Yeah. It’s not something somebody wants to hear. No matter how much they care about you, it’s like all of a sudden you get very self-interested, and it’s hard not to show that in your face, and still seem caring. Somebody’s telling you something really difficult, but in your mind you’re like, I don’t fucking want — I don’t want to get herpes! [Laughs] So I think there was a little bit of that. But he’s a very practical, sort of science-oriented person, so for him it was like: What does it mean? How do we make it not a problem. But then we were in a long term relationship, and I guess because I never had another flare-up, it became sort of a non-issue. I honestly just don’t think about it anymore. But at the time it was significant, it was horrible. You feel dirty.

So you slept with someone before that and didn’t disclose — 
I can’t remember who it was, but I have this sense that I slept with somebody and didn’t tell them.

But they were fine.
I never heard about it.

Do you remember how you felt about that?
I think it’s how I felt the bajillion times I didn’t use a condom. You know you should be doing something, and you just don’t. You let it recede, and you just let this other thing happen. After, yeah. I probably felt shitty about it, and then just let that go away. I was probably drunk.

What do you think you would have done if someone had told you they had herpes?
It would depend. If it was somebody who I thought there was some relationship potential, I’d want to find out — how is it transmitted? I’d probably be practical, like my current partner was about it. If it was just a casual thing, it might color my — it might go on the list. Of weighing the balance of whether to fuck the person.

Did you tell any friends, or was it something that you kind of kept to yourself?
I undoubtedly told my best friend at the time. But no, I mean — no, I felt quite stigmatized by it. Like, quite ashamed of it. I don’t think it was something, for a long time, that I talked about. And especially when you’re active, sexually. Like now, even if I were still having flareups or something, if it were something that I was still sort of actively living with — I might feel like it was a good public service to fight the stigma, and want to talk about it openly. But if it’s going to affect your chances of having sex.

The crazy thing is, we’ve all agreed we’re going to have sex, and we’re going to have casual sex for years, in the dozens — you can’t do that without thinking about STIs. Before this happened, do you remember any partners disclosing to you?
No. Well, the guy who had the cold sores who gave it to me, he was very conscientious about his cold sores. If he felt one coming, it was like, “Oh, I can’t kiss you, let’s not.” But never in any of the other sexual escapades. And back then it wasn’t common to have an HIV conversation before sex. You just didn’t deal with it. You just didn’t talk. There was this sense, at least, a discourse that you should be doing it. But in my circle, anyways, nobody was.

2.

So I have herpes.

Do you?

As near as I can tell, I got it from my wife, when we first started dating.

Do you remember the first time you had a breakout?
Yes. The first time was really really terrible, it was way worse than the subsequent ones. And it was like, Oh no, my life is over, I can’t believe this happened. In addition to having an outbreak, you have a fever, you just feel shitty. And you feel shitty emotionally, there’s just a lot of shame involved, like, it’s really terrible. But what nobody tells you about herpes is that it’s not really that bad. You have an outbreak, and then there are drugs, first of all, that make it nonexistent, and I don’t even need to take them. I have an outbreak once every five years, if that.

How often do you talk to people who aren’t your wife about it?
Not very often. But if someone’s saying something really ridiculous about it, I’ll say, you know, it’s not that big a deal. I have it. It’s one of the STDs — STIs, I’m old — where it’s not like chlamydia or something, you have to inform your partners about it, if you are a good and conscionable person, forever. So it’s a thing that’s very hard for people. I have my qualms with Dan Savage, but the one thing I’ll say that he does very well is try to destigmatize this particular STI, because I think the statistic is that half of all sexually active people have it —

Really!
Yeah, it’s a ridiculously high number of people. Maybe it’s like 20 percent. But a lot of people can have it and be asymptomatic. So it’s kind of a weird thing, it’s much more common than people think.

So how early in the relationship did this happen?
Like, two months in. Very, very early.

And at the time did you know that she had herpes, or did she know that she had herpes?
She did not, I did not. If it weren’t for the fact that we had been friends for a few years before we were together, I don’t think our relationship would have survived it.

Why not?
Just because of the embarrassment, and there’s an impulse to blame people, especially very early in a relationship. If you don’t know someone so well, there’s a potential to distrust them — they probably knew about it and didn’t say anything. We had layers of trust built up from having known each other for a while. And to be honest, we both started showing symptoms at the same time, so it could just as easily have been me. I don’t think it was.

Actually, the way you describe it, it sounds like it could be a bonding experience.
You know, in a weird way I think it can. We went to the clinic together — well, I went to my clinic, and she went to her clinic, and we went together, and we were very frank with one another about it. It was definitely a thing where, it was like, this is something we can fall apart over, or we can deal with it together, and we’ll probably be better for having dealt with it together. So in that way I guess it was a bonding experience.

Also the fact that it arose spontaneously between the two of you. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but there’s some, like — symbolic texture to that?
Elaborate.

I don’t know, you start sleeping with the person who’s your soulmate, and then, it’s like you’re betrothed — I don’t know, I think I’m getting a bit bananas right now.
[Laughs] No, in a way I understand. It’s like we’re marked, in a way. And I have to say — not that I would ever be unfaithful to her, but everybody who’s in a long-term relationship develops crushes on other people, and one of the things I always think about when I develop a crush on someone else is, Oh, I’d have to explain this to them. That significantly diminishes the risk of taking a crush very seriously.

Can you imagine your reaction to getting herpes outside the context of a relationship?
I think I would have become very self destructive. I think I would taken it very poorly, I think I would have panic attacks, I think I wouldn’t have handled it very well at all. And at the time I was panicking, and really stressed out about it, but there would have been much more of a spiral of self-loathing. I mean, I know people who are not in committed relationships who have to have that conversation every time. And I really feel for them, it’s a really really tough thing, because there’s a decent chance, every time you have that conversation with someone, that they’re going to say, I’m sorry, I like you, but it’s not worth it to me. I don’t know you well enough, and I don’t want to get this viral infection, so I’m just going to give up on whatever’s going on here. And that’s a really shitty position to be in.

Yeah. That seems like the worst part of it.
Absolutely. So in a lot of ways, I totally lucked out. I mean, it’s easy for me to talk about how not bad it is, when I got it from the person I married.

Does having herpes, or did having herpes, at the outset, have any implications for the way that you thought of yourself, beyond just sex?
I would say so. It makes you feel kind of unclean, like symbolically unclean. In a way that’s permanent, it’s like a tattoo a little bit — this thing is never going to come off. Even though it’s not something that I think about day to day. But when it first happened, especially because the first outbreak was so bad, it was so gross — I was like, Oh god, I’m marked forever. And of course, I did what anybody would do, which is run to the Internet, and there were people saying: I have an outbreak every month, it’s terrible, this is the worst thing that’s happened to me, I’m going to be alone forever. And I thought, Oh, this could very well happen to me. This could contribute to the dissolution of this relationship, and then I’m just going to be this person with, like, visible wounds, alone forever.

So since that first bad one, you’ve had only occasional outbreaks.
Right.

Do you ever have flashbacks to the way you felt the first time? Or has it become a purely practical matter.
I would say that shame returns a bit, yeah. Like, uh-oh, this is a gross thing that follows me around, and if I were smarter and more careful, this wouldn’t have happened. Which is not necessarily true. I can’t totally escape the feeling that, like, I’m a little unclean because I have an STI. That will never go away.

3.

So, how did you get herpes?
I got herpes the week of 9/11, from this jock, a former heroin addict [laughs] who I was spending time with, ’cause I was just — I was just horny at the time. And it should have been a red flag when he came over one day and said, “I have these really sore cuts on my lip.” And I would say less than a week later I woke up, and my whole body — I describe it as my vagina felt like an oozing pizza pop.

Wow.
Yep. It was terrible. And all my glands were swollen, I had flu-like symptoms. It was just really painful and not fun at all.

So he had oral sores.
Yeah. And I had sores on my nipples, I had one on my hand, and all over my vagina.

How did you feel?
Well, I went to the clinic, and they were like — oh, we don’t even need to test you, that’s totally herpes. And I was in shock, and I went home and I remember calling a bunch of my friends, crying and really dramatic, and one of them was like, Whatever dude, I’ve had it for years. And my other friend was laughing: Dude, everyone has it! And that wasn’t enough for me, so I just called as many people as I could before I got sympathy. But I haven’t had an outbreak since. And it took me about a decade to realize how insignificant it really is.

Insignificant in terms of physical symptoms, or altogether?
I remember once I came across this lawsuit where someone was suing someone for giving him herpes, because it somehow led to him being paraplegic, or quadriplegic, from nerve damage through the sores — but it was a very, very rare case. So yeah, that’s the worst thing that can happen. But other than that, the worst thing that can happen is someone will reject you, I guess. And that’s happened maybe once.

Did you find that a lot more people than you knew also had herpes?
Not a lot, but some of my closest friends did. My best friend since childhood.

But they didn’t give you the response you were looking for.
Yeah, I wanted sympathy. I wanted like — Oh, you poor thing, you poor baby, that’s terrible. Because I had never experienced that level of shock, or physical pain, I guess. I was really sore. I just wanted to be coddled and told everything was going to be OK.

That’s interesting, since I would have thought there’d be a lot of comfort in knowing that you weren’t an outcast. It’s interesting that it actually felt better to think of your problems as set apart.
Yeah, I think it’s just — I was hysterical, and I just wanted them to calm me down. But they were like, whatever, it’s not a big deal. At that moment it felt like a really big deal. I was physically hurting, and in shock. I felt like damaged goods. You know, all the stigma behind it: no one’s ever going to want to fuck me again, whatever. So I guess I felt, ultimately, OK, someone else can relate. But now I have quite a good number of friends who have it, and call me — Oh, thinking about you! — if they have an outbreak or whatever [laughs]. It’s something to sort of bond about.

Did you talk to to the guy about it?
Yeah. I got him to meet me in person, I was panicked, and he was really concerned, and he was actually relieved when I told him — he thought he’d gotten me pregnant. He wasn’t really that bothered, but I assumed he’d had this conversation before. He was not a bright fellow. He wasn’t my boyfriend, it was pretty casual, but he wasn’t in the picture much longer.

Did it change your sex life?
The guy that I hooked up with after that became my boyfriend for four years, and it wasn’t a healthy relationship. So I had the outbreak, and then a month later I had an outbreak again, and this time I had like 20 cold sores on my mouth. It was just really bad. Since then I haven’t had an outbreak, that I’m aware of. And he was empathetic at the time, and then over the course of years he would use it against me. He would call it my dirty disease, he would just be really mean about it. And then the next guy I slept with after that, I remember we were at a yard sale and he got this book of holistic remedies, and I was like, Oh, look up cold sores, and he was like, Why, do you have herpes? And I was like, Yeah, actually, I do. And he was like, Yeah, me too. [Laughs]

How long into the relationship was that?
That was on our first sort of date.

That’s convenient!
Mmhm. It was really significant for me. Because I had felt so bad about it, even though, looking back now, it’s silly. I felt really bad about myself for having something I couldn’t change. It was such a relief to have this response of, “Oh, whatever.” Nonchalant, accepting.

So, having sex on a casual basis since then, do you tell people before you sleep with them?
I do, and usually it never stops, because they’re usually like, Ohhhhh — it’s usually right before they put the condom on. But now I kind of suss it out. If I’m not going to see this person again, I probably won’t tell them. Also, I’m really good with condoms, and I haven’t had an outbreak, nothing serious, for years and years and years. I used to feel a lot more obligated. Usually I make it clear that it’s been a while since I’ve had an outbreak. And it’s not a big deal.

I feel nervous, I’m kind of unsettled, because they have the right to say no thank you. But I don’t know if I’d want to be with someone that ignorant, or that much of a hypochondriac.

Is it something you still think about much? Does it come up in your sex life, or your personal life?
No. I don’t really think about it. I mean, I think about it — the fact that I have it, the virus is swimming around in my system and chilling out. It’s weird. It’s never going away. But it feels dormant. I don’t know. There is a stigma, and at the time it’s really shitty, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that serious. It’s mild.

If you would like to talk anonymously about an STI, email [email protected]